


Epitaph

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, F/M, Strange Narrative Perspective, Unreliable Narrator, inner monologue, musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 18:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13486815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: “He tells me my death in any universe makes him sad.”Janeway has a conversation.





	Epitaph

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to those who encouraged me to post.  
> I have a magnificent beta, Mia Cooper, but if she’s snowed under I may well take up your offer one day. It was so short, I didn’t think it was deserving, but I do love it.  
> So thank you for the encouragement Tumblr family.

* * *

I don’t think about you often. The truth is I am so consumed by my day to day life that another day slips by and you don’t enter my consciousness. I walk to work, and I’m too busy enjoying the reality of life here, that I can’t stop to remind myself of you.

  
In bed I sleep soundly, and I’ve learned not to think about the things that hurt, especially before I fall asleep, so I rarely consider you then. That is the truth.

  
The other truth is that I don’t want to.

  
I don’t want to think about you. But you are always there, lingering in the shadows of every choice I make - however small - so to give any time to you seems too dramatic a concession to make. So I don’t think about you…well, not often.

  
If, and when, you do come to me, it’s unexpected; I’ll be chopping vegetables for that night’s dinner (I don’t cook, but I pretend to assist while guzzling wine and just watching him be) or reading a novel I’ve read hundreds of times, and suddenly you push your way into my consciousness and you stand front and centre of my memory and I have to submit to remembering you, and what it felt like to know you, and hardly know you at all. It’s fascinating, really, because you _are_ like a novel I’ve read hundreds of times, and I may not like and I may even hate you, but I keep on coming back to you. Every time I do, I find something new to analyse.

  
You looked like me, you wore my skin, you spoke with my voice. Older: gravelled by too much coffee, too much whiskey and not enough sleep. And something else; pain maybe, and certainly bitterness.

  
You said you gave coffee up, but I doubt that. I can’t imagine that. I think - I know - you would like to, but how could you ever resist the aroma of it at the ungodly hours I know you had to wake up?

  
He brings me it in the mornings, when I’m wrapped in the sheets and still exhausted from the day before, and I curl my fingers around the mug as he kisses my head and says “Goodmorning, love.” Sotto voice. A voice I love. I touch the ink on his brow, and then our day begins.

  
But your voice, your voice was different. Mine and not mine simultaneously, tainted with a bitterness I hope never to know but that made my skin itch with curiosity. Not enough to ask you, but enough for you to tell me.

  
Your motives repulsed me and moved me simultaneously, tugging on each fibre of my morality. You didn’t say as much - why would you? - but I suspect the reasons you gave me painted you in a better light than your genuine motives. You said you came back to save them, but just at the back of my mind, buried with the other things I’m sure of but loathe admitting, is the knowledge that you came to save yourself.

  
And give yourself a chance.

  
I’ve never been that selfless, so I can’t imagine you would be either. I want to be appalled too, but I don’t have the right to that kind of high ground.

  
When you do come into my mind - conscious, thought of, rather than lingering - I sometimes tell him. He tells me my death in any universe makes him sad.

  
He’s too good for me. But you know that. He was too good for you too.

  
When he says it, I stay silent. I pretend to care, in the stillness of it. I can’t bring myself to tell him that watching you go to your death was easy (it was a relief, actually). That in consigning you to an honourable death, when you had no honour at all, made me breathe for the first time in seven years.

  
I was happy to watch you go, and watch my misery go with you. I was happy to condemn you to death, because you were emblematic of everything that was beginning to wither within me.

  
So now I don’t give you too much room - just enough to remind myself of all the deaths I don’t want to have, and all the ones I do.

  
And sometimes, when it’s quiet, I pray to a God I don’t believe in that I’ll never cross paths with you again.


End file.
